"Probably 90% of medieval
people [in Europe] were peasants. But
astonishingly
little is known about them. Universally
illiterate,
like
prehistoric
people, they left no documents of
their own. Literate members
of medieval society, mainly churchmen,
either ignored the peasants or, in
most cases,
mentioned them with contempt. To reconstruct
the life of
peasants, not only their economic condition
but also their
customs,
attitudes,
and inner
experiences presents an
impossible challenge." [JUDD]
"[Medieval] satire [about peasants],"
says Jacques Le Goff, "often emphasizes the peasant's filth, poor clothing,
and minimal diet, but also a sort of bestiality that placed him ... between
beasts and humans ... [This reflects] the undeniable and widespread conditioning
brought on by harsh living conditions, alimentary shortages, monotonous work,
a daily struggle for existence, the great scourge of famines, recurrent epidemics,
and the dangers of war ... " [LE GOFF] (As recently as pre-World War
II Poland, Jewish author Norman Salsitz, who was raised in that country, notes
that "all across Poland the peasant was held in almost universal contempt.")
[SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 88]
These peasants are that stock from whom
most Euro-Americans have descended. And
these impoverished and often desperate people who harbored the greatest day
to day grievances against the Jews, and who perpetrated most of the violence
against them -- are rendered entirely mute in the twentieth century. We know
well the Jewish martryology myths of the Middle Ages story, told and retold
by their Hebrew and Yiddish chroniclers that are popular Jewish canon today.
But we don't know the peasants' version of things; there is only scant reference
to them by the Christian clergy or local aristocracy, neither of whom were
even remotely sympathetic to their plight.
A Jewish author, Max Dimont, lays the barest
outline of the peasant torment:
"[Christian feudal life
was like] a vast prison. The bars were the
all-encompassing restrictions placed
upon the daily life of the
people. Inside the bars were the
peasants, the so-called Third
Estate, who comprised about 95
per cent of the total population.
Outside the bars but tied to them
by invisible chains were the other
two estates, the priests and the
nobles. Neither inside the prison nor
tied to the bars outside it were
the Jews, the unofficial "Fourth
Estate."
The restrictions placed on the
feudal serfs, as the peasants were
called, pursued them from "womb
to tomb." There could be no
movement from one estate to another
except through the ranks of
the clergy, and then only for the
exceptionally gifted child.
Restrictions on travel kept the serf tied to the soil. He usually saw
nothing of the world except that
within walking distance. Though he
was technically a free man, he could own no property. He could be
sold with the land by his lord
... The peasant had to grind his flour
in the lord's granary, bake his
bread in the lord's bakery -- all for a
fee, paid either in goods or in
labor. He could only own wooden
dishes, and one spoon was all he was allowed for his entire family,
no matter what its size. The kind
of cloth he could buy, sell, or
wear, was regulated. The lord was
allowed to sample everything his
serfs had, including their brides ... " [DIMONT, p. 247]
"In this [feudal] system," notes
Eva Hoffman, "the Jews who were growing more numerous and visible could
be thought of as another estate, with its own place in the ordained social
order." [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 47] "All Eastern European Jewry,"
notes a Yiddish folk saying, "is one town." [KUMOVE, S., 1985, p.
47]
"No travelers' account of Poland,"
says Jerzy Lukowski, "was complete without almost ritual reference to
the degradation of the serfs ... In Poland, peasants were forbidden to leave
their villages without seigneurial [manor lord] permission in 1496 ... Until 1768, the noble seigneur
enjoyed the power of life and death over his serfs. He could buy and sell
them like chattel, independently of landed transactions." [LUKOWSKI,
p. 38] As late as the 1800s, says Jewish scholar Howard Sachar, "the
typical Russian peasant was bound in serfdom to his soil. Diseased, ignorant,
hopelessly superstitious, he lived in a rude hut, slept in his clothes, and
fed his fire with animal dung." [SACHAR, p. 80] And as Sula Benet notes
about Poland:
"For three hundred years, until 1784,
the peasants were serfs, bound
to their land and to their lords. After
that, although the Constitution
of 1791 nominally changed their status,
there was little real change
in their position or condition until Poland
was reconstituted in 1919,
after the first World War." [BENET,
S., p. 31]
And what of the Jewish merchants and money
lenders, and the Jews at-large, the people that kept to themselves and refused
to interact with others except towards commercial profit, these people from
whom many impoverished Gentiles sought out to borrow money, not to expand
their fortunes, but merely to survive the current season?
Dimont continues:
"None of these restrictions
applied to the Jews. They were free to
come and go, marry and divorce,
sell and buy as they pleased....
The priests were excluded from
work, the nobles did not want to
work, and the serfs were not
allowed to enter the bourgeoisie or
middle-class professions. There
was no one left to do this work
except the Jews, who therefore
became indispensable. The Jews
were the oil that lubricated
the creaky machinery of the feudal
state." [DIMONT, p. 247]
Jews were visibly distinct from the rest
of the population, especially by dress. They usually wore black and the men
were distinguished by side locks over their ears. They also '"stood out
by specific mannerisms," says Janusz Tazbir, "their nervous gestures,
continually emphasizing the spoken word, and their characteristic feverish
haste." The Jew was to a Christian "an economic rival, an onerous
creditor, accused of arrogance and impudence ... and willing to suffer any
humiliation for even a small gain. " They were widely perceived as cowards
and swindlers who held "occupations that did not deserve to be called
'work.'" [TAZBIR, p. 27-31]
Bernard Weinryb suggests as typical the
area of Breslau in the mid-14th century: perhaps 10% of the Jewish community
was "poor and about 7% 'very rich,' thus placing about four-fifths of
the Jewish population in the middle-income range, whatever this may have meant
to them." [WEINRYB, p. 70] Even as late as the twentieth century, there
can be no comparison between the strata of "poor" in the Jewish
community and the impoverished Gentile peasant society at-large around them.
Ewa Morawska notes that
"At the end of the last century in
Galicia [a province that is today divided
between Poland and the Ukraine, including
the city of Krakow], a region
generally poorer than other provinces
of Eastern Europe, about 50,000
peasants annually died of starvation;
such catastrophes did not occur
in Jewish society, even among the most
deprived, partly because of the
well-organized in-group assistance, but
also because of a somewhat
higher general standard of living." [MORAWSKA, p. 12]
A good example of chronic Jewish myopia
concerning their own history, completely devoid of the wider context of European
history around it, is Poland. This
country -- until Hitler's campaign to exterminate Jews, and Poles, and others
-- was the home for more Jews than any other place in the world. After being
expelled from other areas of Europe in the mid-1300's, Jews were allowed by
the ruling nobles to immigrate to feudal Poland. There, despite modern Jewish
itemization of alleged Polish persecutions over the centuries, the Jewish
community flourished. (Just before World War II, "84% of all the Jews
in the world either lived in historically Polish territory, or came from families
that had lived there." [SHERWIN, p. 157] To this day Jewish popular opinion
still condemns Poles and their culture, with accusations of all sorts leading
up to alleged Polish indifference to -- and betrayal of -- the Jews under
the Nazis. More about that later.
Let's go back a few centuries. What kind of country, we might wonder,
had the Jews moved to? Beyond the sacred island of Jewry, what was the indigenous
populations' miserable situation? What were the social and political forces
that were boiling all around them? In war after war after war, Poland has
been a country continuously ripped apart, partitioned, divided, and subdivided
by invaders for centuries. If anyone has a legitimate claim to historic victimization,
Poles can stake a claim as deeply valid as anybody. Here is a rudimentary
chronological overview of the social upheaval, religious tension, and terrors
that ripped through all or part of Polish society (which has changed and reformed
in expanse) for hundreds of years, beginning with the century before the Jews'
arrival:
1241-1242. Mongols invade Poland.
1246-1307. Lithuanians raid parts
of Poland.
1248-1287. Jatvingians raid parts
of Poland.
1328-1322. Teutonic (Germanic)
knights and Bohemians crush
Poland in a
series of wars.
1350's.
Jews began immigrating en masse to Poland.
1399. Mongols defeat Poland in
war.
1410. Poland defeat Teutonic knights
in war.
1419. Protestant Hussite rebellion.
1454-1467. Polish uprising against
the Teutonic knights.
1475, 1484. Ottoman Empire attacks
parts of Poland.
1486-94. Russian Tsar Ivan II
the Great attacks Lithuania.
1492. Tatars raid parts of Poland.
1497. Moldavians militarily defeat
Poles.
1498-99. Tatar invasion reaches
Krakov, one of Poland's
greatest cities.
1500-1503. Tsar Ivan II attacks
Lithuania again.
1507-1508. Polish war with Russia
over Lithuania.
1512-22. Polish war with Russia
over Lithuania.
1524. Ottoman troops cut through
parts of Poland
and conquer sections
of Hungary.
1558-82. Russian Tsar Ivan IV
the Terrible fights 24 year long
war against Teutonic
kingdom.
1563-70. Russia invades Poland
in First Nordic War.
1578-81. Poland defeats Russia
in three campaigns.
1600-1635. Swedish-Poland war.
1618-1648. Thirty Years War, of
which Poland has peripheral
involvement.
1620. Poles defeat Prince of Transylvania.
1621-1631. Poles defeat Turks
in battle, but Turkish attacks
continue for
ten more years.
1633-34. Poles attack Turks, Russians,
and Swedes.
1635. Poland seizes Swedish ports
on Baltic Sea.
1648, 1651. Rebellion of Cossacks
against Polish nobles. With
armed aid from
Tatars and Turks, hundreds of
thousands of people are massacred.
1654-1655. Russia attacks Poland
and conquers eastern part.
1655, 1657. Poles defeat Swedish
and Brandenburg armies.
1660-62. Polish union with Ukraine
and defeat of Russia.
Polish rebellion
against King of Poland.
1672-1673. Turks attack Poland;
Poland loses two-thirds of
Ukraine.
1673. Turks defeated.
1683. Turks driven from Vienna,
a crucial event for Europe.
1700-21. The Northern War. Polish
alliances attack Sweden.
1704-1710. Swedish troops destroy
one-third of all Polish cities.
1756-63. Seven Years War. Russian
armies used Polish bases in
their war against
Prussia.
1768-72. Polish Catholic uprisings,
known as the Confederation of
Bar.
1794. Polish popular insurrection
against Russia and Prussia.
1797-1801. Polish legions, formed
from former Austrian prisoners
of war, fight
Austria.
1806. France attacks Prussia,
Russia aids France, and Poles rebel
against Prussia.
1809. Napoleonic Wars of 1809.
1830-31. Polish insurrection and
war against Russia.
1833-1846. Rebellious Polish revolutionary
cells captured and
imprisoned.
1846. Polish rebellion put down by Austrian troops.
1853-56. Russia's Crimean War
leads to reforms in Poland.
1863. Polish insurrection, put
down. Executions and exile.
Russian governor makes
"every effort to stamp out Polish
culture altogether."
1905. Polish patriots take part
in abortive revolution against Russian
government.
1914. World War I. 800,000 Poles
killed and destruction of the
country.
1917. Russian Revolution.
1918. Polish uprising against Germans
in city of Poznan.
1920. Polish-Soviet war.
1929. Polish unemployment hits
33%, not including those employed
in agriculture.
1936, 1938. Violent uprisings,
strikes.
1939. Fall of Poland to the Nazis
in World War II.
[ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITTANICA,
1993]
This is the kind of country Poland's Jews
lived in since the fourteenth century. "The established order (of the
Polish state) has been overturned on at least five occasions -- in 1138, in
1795, in 1813, in 1864, and in 1939, on each occasion all concrete manifestations
of a unified political community were lost." [DAVIES, p. x] In just the 1600's, for instance, "war,
the bubonic plague, slave raids, and mass murders had reduced the total [Polish
population] ... [to] 45% of the former
total population." [E. Britt., 25, p. 946] Jews were, as elsewhere in
Europe, for centuries not obliged to serve in the military and distanced themselves
from warring factions as much as possible, unless, of course, it was clearly
opportune to make an allegiance. Jews principally functioned -- at least till
the Enlightenment -- with the intertwined aims of insular self-survival, weathering
others' socio-political catastrophes, and advancing wherever and whenever
possible towards the objectives of Jewish individual and communal opportunism.
The failed Polish insurrection against Russian
rule in 1863, notes Theodore Weeks, had the following effect on the populace
in Poland:
"The Jews of Russian Poland were also
affected by the post-1863
repressions. On the whole, however, the
Russian administration did
not single them out -- unlike the Poles
-- for specific restrictive
measures ... Thus as Polish rights were
further restricted, on the
whole, the Jewish legal situation in Russian
Poland remained
relatively untouched." [WEEKS, T.,
p. 64]
"Only a very small percentage of the
population in Poland," notes Bernard Weinryb, "in about 1600 estimated
at less than 10 per cent of the country's total population, had any aspiration
to "rights." Less than half of this small group (the magnates and
the wealthy landed gentry) had standing and influence in the country."
[WEINBRYB, p. 160]
Discriminated against on one hand (as everyone,
short of nobility and clergy, was throughout medieval Europe in some form),
the Jewish community in Poland was also afforded special privileges by the
ruling aristocracy. While Jews were sometimes prohibited from owning land
(as were most other people), they could pay the owning nobles a flat fee to
lease it; profits beyond this fee were theirs to keep. "The belief that
Jews could not own land," notes Albert Lindemann, "ranks as one
of the most often overheard simplifications about their status, both in Russia
and elsewhere in Europe ... The real issue was not whether Jews could own
land, if they would work it with their own hands, but whether they could own
land that allowed them to exploit the labor of the peasants." [LANDEMANN,
Esau's, p. 63]
Jewish author Norman Salsitz notes another
version of the land issue, in his book about growing up in pre-World War II
Poland:
"My father's father was born and spent
his life on an estate not far
from Kolbuszowa. The estate belonged to
Jacob Eckstein, certainly
the most estimable Jew in our town. Naftali
Saleschutz, my grandfather,
served as manager, which brought him into
close relations with many
peasants who worked in the fields belonging
to Eckstein and gave him
a sense of connection with the soil. (The
Jews had lived in the area since
the sixteenth century; they were originally
farmers but had in time moved
off to the towns and villages and lost direct
contact with the land)."
[SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 28]
For the non-Jewish part, notes Michael Aronson,
"Russian peasants endured a hunger not only for food. They suffered from
land hunger as well." [ARONSON, p. 25]
Jews in Poland were formally protected and
served as tax-collectors, bankers, and administrators of the money mints,
breweries and salt mines. (In later centuries Jews eventually owned many of
such important industries). Even the Polish King Casimir the Great fell into
debt to Jewish lenders, as did King Lewis of Hungary. [LEON, p. 156] "In
the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries," says Abram Leon, "Jewish usurers
succeeded in taking possession of the lands belonging to the nobles."
[LEON, p. 185] Until the union of Poland and Lithuania, Jews perhaps had it
even better in Lithuania. "Lithuanian Jews," says Leon, "enjoyed
the same rights of the free population. In their hands lay big business, banking,
the customhouses, etc. The farming of taxes and customs brought them great
wealth. Their clothes glittered with gold and they wore swords just like the
gentry." [LEON, p. 189]
"Jews in southeastern Poland ...,"
notes Jewish scholar Bernard Weinryb,
"were legally on par with the nobles
with regard to the amounts paid as
indemnification for being wounded or killed.
If we go beyond formality
and consider the prevailing practice the
position of the Jew appears in
a more favorable light. If he could not
be nobleman, he could be like
one -- or in the place of one. Jewish
lessees of the king's or nobles'
villages and towns, or of various taxes
and other sources of revenue,
were accorded broad powers and status-bearing
functions, often over
large expanses populated by many people,
not all of them peasants.
To these Jews were transformed almost
Lord's power, mostly including
the perquisites of local justice. A number
of Jews actually did behave
like nobles -- conducting themselves haughtily,
arrogantly, arbitrarily,
dictatorially, and sometimes even recklessly
... A number of cases are
known in which a non-Jewish tax collector,
or nobleman, or a court
usher, was simply afraid to enter the
houses of prominent Jews on
business, not wanting to risk being thrown
out or beaten up ... Many
... instances are known in which Polish
Jewish communities or other
groups refused to follow Polish court
summonses or orders from
other offices." [WEINRYB, p. 162-163]
In later centuries, however, "increasingly,"
says Leon, "the Jews came in contact only with the poor, the artisans,
and the peasants. And often the anger of the people, despoiled by the Kings
and Lords and compelled to pledge their last belongings to the Jews, turning
against the walls of the [Jewish] ghetto." [LEON, p. 155]
The Jewish role of hated tax collector was
common not only in Poland, but throughout Europe. Salo Baron writes that:
"Most widespread was the Jewish
contribution to tax farming. The
medieval regimes, as a rule, aided
by only small, inefficient, and
unreliable bureaucracies, often preferred
to delegate tax collection
to private entrepreneurs who, for
a specific lump sum they paid
the treasury, were prepared to exact
the payments due from the
taxpayers. Of course, the risks of
under collection were, as a rule,
more than made up by considerable
surpluses obtained, if need
be, by ruthless methods. [BARON, EH of J, p. 46]
"Wealthy Jews," notes Bernard
Weinryb, "with good connections among those in power, and on one hand,
underworld elements, believed in their own ability to take care of themselves,
or to invoke the protection of the powerful. They frequently resorted to hard
and brutal measures to achieve their ends ... " [WEINRYB, p. 164] Typically,
Jewish apologists like Leon Poliakov -- following traditional martyrological
models -- blame Jewish economic "aggression" against non-Jews as
a response to Gentile hostility
to them:
"The Jews replied to Christian animosity
by a hatred just as intense but
necessarily restrained or repressed. Whereas
the aggressive potential of
the Christians could be expressed at will
and discharged directly, Jewish
aggression was obliged to seek other channels
and to become in some
way transmuted. The psychic energy thus
accumulated had ample
opportunity to function in the realm of
the struggle for existence -- in
the pursuit of negotiable currency."
[POLIAKOV, p. 87]
Along with Jewish leases on tax collecting,
inns, dairies, flour mills, tolls, and other essentials of commerce, says
Simon Dubnov, "the Jews inherited from the landed gentry some of the
rights over the serfs. The lessees endeavored to extract as much revenue as
possible from the nobleman's estates, and to do that it was necessary to exploit
the peasantry." [DUBNOV, v. 4, p. 26]
"Jews," writes Witold Rymankowki,
"in contrast to the millions of serfs and the impoverished townspeople
who were oppressed by the nobility, constituted a privileged group which ...
effectively represented the only class in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
to concentrate finance and liquid assets in its hands." [POLONSKY, p.
156] An old Latin proverb proclaimed that the Polish Commonwealth was "heaven
for the nobles, purgatory for the townsfolk, hell for the peasants, and paradise
for the Jews." [HAGEN, p. 13]
"The Council of Four Lands," says
David Biale, "which was the supracommunal governing body of the Polish
Jews, maintained a virtual 'Jewish lobby' at the Polish parliament. In the
eyes of enemies of the Jews, the power of this lobby was such that, according
to a statement from 1669, 'in practice Jews do not let any law materialize
which is unfavorable to them.'" [BIALE, POWER, p. 72]
Jews prospered so well that, when the Polish
and Lithuanian nobility merged forces in the mid-sixteenth century, Jews followed
up with their "services." With Polish expansion into the Ukrainian
frontiers, Jews leased land there too from the aristocracy, and dictated over
the population of serf-slaves. Wealthy Jews established themselves securely
throughout the Polish economy and farmed out work and management opportunities
to relatives and co-religionists. "During the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries," says Salo Baron, "domestic commerce (in Poland and Lithuania)
as well as export (timber, grain, furs) and import (cloth, wine, luxuries)
were for the most part in Jewish hands." [BARON, EHOJ, p. 227] In fact,
Heinrich Graetz states that "circumstances were such at the time that
the Jews of Poland could form a state within a state." [GRAETZ, Pop
Hist, p. 10, v. 5; in LEON, p. 190]
The Jews of Poland were exploited by the
Polish nobility (in the sense that they were heavily taxed as a communal entity).
But Jews in turn ruthlessly exploited the masses of impoverished peasants
beneath them, most of the non-Jews of the land, and even the burghers, townsfolk,
and sometimes nobles. "[Jews]
enjoyed religious and communal autonomy and enriched themselves, becoming
the most numerous group of capitalists in the country. They were sufficiently
protected by law, and living in wealth they turned to Talmudic studies."
[OXFORD POLAND, p. 567]
In Germany, the Jewish opportunity to collect
money for no work (per usury) was noted by an ancient rabbi, Shalom ben Isaac
Sekel:
"The reason why the Torah
holds a higher place [for Jews] in
Germany than in other places is
that the Jews here charge interest
to Gentiles and need not engage
in an [time-consuming] occupation.
On this score they have time to study the Torah."
[BARON, EHoJ,
p. 55]
The upper strata of Jewish wealth attracted
malevolent attention. In sixteenth century Poland there were formal complaints
that "Jews in the royal towns have synagogues and houses, which are finer
and more numerous than the churches and the houses of Christians. There is
a need for the King to act fast to rectify this." [POLONSKY, p. 58]
In seventeenth century Poland, Hirsz Kiejdanower,
identified as a Jewish "mystic," wrote:
"I have seen Jewish women out
on the street, dressed not as Jews
but as nobles. They question their
husbands' opinions and bring
Christian hatred and jealousy upon
us." [POLONSKY, p. 50]
For their part, the peasants were in a despicable
state. In Poland the aristocracy's complete control over commoner lives was
legalized with statutes in 1496, 1518, 1532, and 1543, whereby the poor were
formally rendered as human chattel living "under conditions of virtual
slavery as cheap laborers for the noble's farmstead economy." [ENCY BR,
25, p. 949]
"The Jewish arendator [leasee of land,
mills, inns, breweries, tax farming, etc.]," writes Norman Davies, "became
the master of life and death over the population of entire districts and,
having nothing but a short-term and purely financial interest in the relationship,
was faced with the irresistible temptation to pare his temporary subjects
to the bone. On the noble estates, he tended to put all his relatives and
co-religionists in charge of the flour mill, the brewery, and in particular
the Lords' tavern, where by custom the peasants were obliged to drink. On
the church estates, he became the collector of all ecclesiastical dues, standing
by the church door for his payment from tithe-payers ... the baptized infant,
newly-weds, and mourners ... The Jewish community became the symbol of social
and economic exploitation." [DAVIES, p. 444]
"The Jewish steward," adds seminal
Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz, "strove to draw as much as possible
from the manors and to exploit the peasants as much as possible." [GRAETZ,
in LEON, p. 192] Likewise, "the toll farmer," remarks Bernard Weinryb,
"had many opportunities to practice abuse. Rates were not clearly fixed.
The toll farmer and his employees had the right to search traveler’s wagons
to confiscate the wares of anyone trying to avoid payment of tolls ... Those
who thought they had been overcharged tended to regard this as Jewish oppression."
[WEINRYB, p. 64]
"Jews," notes Hillel Levine, "sometimes
even managed whole villages and oversaw the economic development and exploitation
of forests, mines, mints, custom houses, toll roads, and breweries on the
gentry's estates, using serf labor ... Jews were motivated ... to squeeze
profits out of the margins. These included more rigorous supervision of the
serfs and more efficient collection of rents and taxes, adding to the harshness
of the serfs' lives and by no means making the Jewish arendator [lessee of
a business enterprise from the lords] beloved." [LEVINE, p. 63]
Chaim Bermant notes:
"In Poland, the Jews became so numerous,
prosperous and entrenched, that
they began to lose something of their caution.
Their whole economy was based
mainly on the arenda system under which they
became tax farmers and collectors
for the crown, or lessees of the forests, estates,
mills and salt mines of the
nobility. Some operated on a large scale, many
on a small scale, leasing a few
acres of land, or operating a small distillery
or tavern, but their utility to their
superiors rested in their powers of extraction.
The peasantry, the work force,
the cattle, the land, were all regarded in much
the same light and were pressed
for their maximum yield, and if the nobility
were thus the ultimate exploiters,
the Jews were the visible ones and aroused the
most immediate hostility. Rabbis
warned that Jews were sowing a terrible harvest
of hatred, but while the revenues
rolled in the warnings were ignored. Moreover,
the rabbis themselves were
beneficiaries of the system." [BERMANT,
C., 1977, p. 26]
The Cambridge History of Poland
notes that:
"Jesuit preachers ... used to
complain that peasants were mere slaves.
Their field service had been steadily
increased and all kinds of abuses
had been practiced. The squires wanted
to sell their badly-brewed ale
and so peasants were simply forced
to drink it. The Jewish innkeeper
had to distribute set quantities among
the peasants, who could throw
it away, but pay for it they must.
[The peasants'] right to buy and sell
became limited; their children were
taken away from them in order to
serve at the manor; they were not
allowed to go to the town in order
to earn money or acquire some learning. The worst condition
existed
on the large domains of the nobility
in Ruthenia. The noblemen
usually farmed out their immense domains
to the so-called
commissaries, and these would extort
money from the peasants, with
the active help of the Jews."
[CAMBRIDGE, p. 566]
The reference to ale is important here.
Jewish merchants were eventually afforded a monopoly on alcohol distribution
throughout most of Poland, including the Ukraine. This meant that the person
who regularly demanded tax payments from such peasant "slaves,"
the person who managed the land and made decisions upon which the impoverished
peasants were exploited, the person who dragged the peasant's child away,
the man who drove the peasant into deeper debt, and the man who sold the peasants
booze to drink away their misery, all had a Jewish face.
In the mid-eighteenth century, in rural
areas of parts of Eastern Europe, up to 85% of the Jewish population "was
involved in some aspect of manufacturing, wholesaling, or retailing of beer,
mead, wine, and grain-based intoxicants, like vodka." [LEVINE, p. 9]
"Anti-Semites," says H. H. Ben-Sasson,
"ascribed the drunkenness prevalent among the peasants and their permanent
state of indebtedness to the wily Jewish taverner, who also extended credit
to them." [BARON, ECHJ, p. 136] (Gentile accusations that Jewish saloon
owners were poisoning the non-Jewish populace with alcohol and contributing
to moral decay even had a direct parallel to Jewish commercial activities
in the American South at the turn of the twentieth century. Jews, who "overwhelmingly
opposed prohibition," yet were known themselves as "unusually sober,"
were singled out for attack by Christian temperance leaders for their great
role in the liquor trade, for what was described as Jewish greed and pursuit
of profit at the expense of public health and morality. [LINDEMANN, p. 232]
During the prohibition years, the Seagram's alcohol fortune was built by the
Bronfman family, who ran illegal liquor into the United States from Canada;
one of the heirs of this fortune, Edgar Bronfman, is the current head of the
Jewish World Congress).
Eastern European Jews had a popular Yiddish
song for this aspect of their prosperity: "Shicker is a goy ... trinker
muss er. (The Gentile is a drunkard; he has to drink.)" [CANTOR,
SC, p. 183] Jews themselves had a marked tendency towards sobriety. George
Mosse suggests that "the reasons for their moderation in the consumption
of alcohol may have ... been ... economic.... Avoidance of drunkenness helped
to avoid expenses and thus assisted in the primary accumulation of capital."
Staying sober, needless to say, is also a distinct advantage, economically
or otherwise, over the intoxicated. And alcoholism is a steady, reliable source
for profit. "The Jews," says Hillel Levine, ".... could avert
facing his contribution to the plight of the serf -- 'A
goy,' he might mutter with self-righteousness, 'drunken sloth is the
essence of the Gentile.' [LEVINE, p. 10]
It is disturbing to note how deeply ingrained
the disdain for non-Jews is in Jewish folk tradition (as well as the lengths
they go to hide it from Gentiles). In a 1955 study of Jewish American stereotypes
equating non-Jews with drunkenness, 38 of 73 Jewish respondents denied they
had ever heard about an association of Gentiles and alcoholics as children,
but "when asked specifically about a childhood ditty called 'Drunken
is the Gentile,' only 17 denied familiarity with it. This turnabout, wrote
the researcher, Charles Snyder, was because Jewish respondents recognized
that "the interviewer knew the prevailing folk beliefs and that it was
no longer necessary to conceal ethnocentric ideas behind a universalistic
front." [SKLARE, p. 576]
Under the veil of objective scholarship,
a pair of modern (1952) scholars even echoed classical Jewish stereotypes
and contempt for non-Jewish peasantry with this defaming vignette from their
book about their beloved Eastern European Jewish community:
"It is no rare occurrence for the market
day to end in violence. The
peasant, having sold his wares, will celebrate
his profits -- and perhaps
drink them away -- at a Jewish inn. When
he can no longer pay for liquor
and still insists on more, he will be thrown
out, whereupon if he is already
inflamed by drinking he sets up a cry, "The
Jew has cheated me!" If a
group of comrades who have shared the activities
of the day should join
him, a token riot may follow." [ZBOROWSKI,
p. 67]
Anthropologist Frances Pine notes traditional peasant
perceptions of local lawyers and innkeepers (code words for Jews, especially
the latter) in the Polish mountain area known as the Podhale:
"Lawyers and innkeepers were portrayed
as encouraging village men to drink
and then, when
they were unable to pay their debts, taking their lands as forfeit.
Many of these stories
probably contain substantial truths; for instance, land
records from the 19th until the
mid-20th century show frequent mortgaging
of lands and transfers of land
title to pay off debt to non-villagers who are
listed as innkeepers and advocates."
[Pine, F., 1999, p. 52]
Jews continued to invest in and propagate
alcohol, a product they recognized was harmful and were disinclined to use
themselves (short of ritual wine uses). By the late nineteenth century perhaps
the largest brewery in Europe, Schultheiss-Patzenhofer, "was a 'Jewish
firm' (in terms of management, Board membership, and financial links)."
[MOSSE, p. 12-13] In the Ukraine, by 1872, after the feudal system had passed
into history, wealthy Jews owned about 90% of Ukraine's distilleries, as well
as 56% of its sawmills, 48% of its tobacco production, and 33% of the sugar
refineries. [SUBTLENY, p. 277] A
Jewish business mogul, notes Chaim Weizman, the Russian-born first president
of israel, "Mr. Brodsky, [was] the sugar king of Russia." [WEIZMAN,
C., 1949, p. 100]
In the Russian province of Zhitomir,
73.7% of the Jews living there made their living by leasing distilleries and
selling alcohol at taverns. [LINDEMANN, p. 152]
Even in the Polish town of Oswiecim (renamed and known infamously as
the Nazi site for the concentration camp Auschwitz) Jakob Haberfeld, a Jewish
"liquor magnate" owned (up to the World War II era) the most beautiful
building in the area -- a 40-room mansion. [GOLDMAN, A., 1998, p. A1]
(On the subject of Jewish reclamation, in 2001 heirs to the Jewish Wertheim
department store dynasty were even takng ownership to land in Berlin [once
owned by the Wertheim family] that was the site of Adolf Hitler's personal
bunker. [BOYES, R., 6-26-01]
Hayim Zhitlowsky was from the Jewish village
of Uschah in what later became part of the Soviet Union. He was, as one Jewish
historian puts it, "the outstanding thinker of the Jewish cultural renaissance
in the Yiddish language in the twentieth century." He was no vicious,
prejudicial, peasant anti-Semite; he was a lover of his own Jewish people,
and influential in preserving their culture. But Zhitlowsky was deeply troubled
by the omnipresent Jewish exploitation of their surrounding non-Jewish peasant
neighbors. In 1883 he wrote:
"[The Jewish businessman] Samuel
Solomovich Poliakov built railroads
for Russia. Those railroads were, according
to Nekrasov's famous
poem, built on the skeletons of the Russian
peasantry. My uncle
Michael in the [Jewish town of] Uschach
distilled vodka for the Russian
people and made a fortune on the liquor
tax. My cousin sold vodka to
the peasants. The whole town hired them
to cut down Russian woods
which he bought from the greatest exploiter
of the Russian peasants,
the Russian landowner.... Wherever I
turned my eyes to ordinary,
day-to-day Jewish life, I saw only one
thing, that which anti-Semites
were agitating about; the injurious effect
of Jewish merchantry on
Russian peasantry." [In CUDDIHY,
p. 138]
Other Jews, especially among socialists,
were moved by the Eastern European peasants' plight at the hands of Jewish
communities. "We were convinced," wrote one, "that all the
Jews were swindlers." Another, Pavel Akselrod, said that "however
great the poverty and deprivation ... of the Jewish masses ... the fact remains
that, taken overall, some half of them function as a non-productive element,
sitting astride the neck of the lower classes in Russia." [LINDEMANN,
p. 141] Isaac Deutscher notes the case of prominent Jewish communist leader
Leo Trotsky: "Trotsky saw poverty and exploitation from the window of
the home of an upstart Jewish landowner, whose son he was." [DEUTSCHER,
p. 24]
Ber Borochov, a Jew, a socialist, and a
Zionist, explained Jewish exploitation of non-Jews this way: "The vast
majority of non-Jews gain their livelihood from nature ... whereas the majority
of Jews earn their living directly from other men. In Russia and Galicia 70-80%
of non-Jews earn their livelihood from nature; a similar percentage of the
Jews earn theirs from men." [BOROCHOV, p. 68]
By 1918, notes Richard Rubenstein, "in addition to the miserable
condition of the peasants ... between seven and eight million Poles were unemployed
or woefully underemployed in a country of 32,500,000." [RUBENSTEIN, R.,
p. 117] And as Sula Benet observes:
"Before [1946], about sixty per cent
of all farms were too small to
support a family, while at the same time
almost half of the arable land
was owned by a landed nobility representing
less than six-tenths of
one per cent of the agricultural population
... The great majority of
peasants -- almost ten million -- owned
farms too small to furnish
a family subsistence." [BENET, S.,
p. 32-33]
Richard Watt is one of many scholars to
have written a book about some aspect of Polish history. And Watt, like virtually
all modern historians, feels obligated to, with broad strokes, make reference
to the Jewish poor to tone down what must be said about the economic dominance
Jews enjoyed in the country. So, on one hand, Watt remarks that "as a
group [the Jews] were very poor -- but Poland itself was a poor country."
[WATT, p. 360] But he also observes,
however incongruously, that "in every village a Jew owned the store,
a Jew was the horse-and-cattle trader, and a Jew was the moneylender ... Some
Jews dominated the professions of law and medicine. They played major roles
in banking and the insurance industry. In fact, Jews handled practically all
of preindependence Poland's commerce ... [WATT, p. 359] ... Although Poland's Jews comprised 10 percent of the population,
they paid between 35 and 40 percent of Poland's taxes. And because they owned
a substantial amount of Poland's wealth, their mass emigration would have
seriously drained the nation of capital." [WATT, p. 365]
As W. D. Rubinstein notes, in citing the
studies of fellow Jewish scholar Joseph Marcus, "Jew received about 40
per cent of all income earned by Poland's Group I earners [i.e., the wealthiest
people in Poland], including incomes earned in the agricultural sector."
[RUBINSTEIN, WD, 2000, p. 8] [The implication here, of course, is that the
Jewish percentage of the top incomes in Poland was far higher in the commerical
and financial sectors].
In 1975 a Jewish American, Leona Schecter
(living earlier in Moscow with her husband, Time magazine bureau correspondent
Jerrold) recalled a conversation she had with her Ukrainian maid who said
"Yes, it's always the same with the Jews. They've always pushed their
children to do well. It was always that way here and it's the same with you.
At least you don't push food into your children to make them fat, like the
Russian Jews do. In Odessa every Jewish child knew two or three languages
and could play on at least two musical instruments. It paid off -- they have
the easy jobs, they are the intelligentsia with all the privileges. You never
see a Jew in a factory of a on a collective farm."
"I was stunned," writes Schecter, "but there was nothing
I could contradict in what she said." [SCHECTER, 1975, p. 121]
By 1905, notes Theodore Weeks in the journal
Eastern European Jewish Affairs,
"the former landowning elites of noble
background were in many cases
overshadowed or even eclipsed by 'new men,'
many of whom were
Jewish or of Jewish origin ... Poles could,
and did, argue that Jews
had profited from equal rights to enrich
themselves with no thought
to the general good of the Polish land.
Furthermore, following this
argument, nationalist Poles accused Jews
of continuing their own
selfish, anti-Polish interests, of forming
Jewish nationalist groups
which specifically demanded nationalist
rights for non-Polish
languages and culture, and, worst of all,
acting (actively or passively)
as agents of russification in the Polish
provinces." [WEEKS, T., p. 66]
In the early 1800s, in the wake of the Enlightenment,
Russian laws were devised to pry Jews out of their tight ethnocentric ring
and pull them into the broader non-Jewish community. Jewish communal autonomy
was legally deconstructed, limits were put on Jewish trade, Jewish schools
were forced to teach the language of the people in whose midst they lived,
and some Jews were conscripted into the military for the first time (they
had earlier bought their way out). Jews were forced to choose family surnames
and some were relocated to work in agricultural establishments, but "agriculture
held little if any attraction to them." [SACHAR, p. 78] The Russian government's
intention, says Lionel Kochan, was to "decrease the Jewish identity."
[KOCHAN, p. 114]
It didn't work. Russian Jewry could not
be convinced, cajoled, coerced, or torn away from their traditions of "separateness"
and "uniqueness." In spite of every conceivable repressive measure,
notes Howard Sachar, "the Jews remained a cohesive mass, devoutly traditional
in religion and occupation, a separate nation sticking like a bone in Russia's
throat." [SACHAR, p. 84] (Despite later being forcibly assimilated in
the next century under Soviet communism, 69% of the Jews of Vilnius (17,000
people; 7 percent of that city's population) declared in the census of 1959
that Yiddish was their "mother tongue." In Riga, where 30,000 Jews
were 5% of the city population, 48% declared Yiddish to be their mother tongue.
For the Soviet Union at-large in that same year, nearly 20% of all Jews formally
declared Yiddish to be their principle language.) [KOREY, W., 1973, p. 173]
"As late as 1897, 96.9 percent of Russian Jewry declared [Yiddish] to
be their mother tongue." [ASCHHEIM, S., 1982, p. 11]
With the emancipation of the peasant serfs
in the 1860s and 1870s, Jewish socio-economic life was changing; aristocratic-linked
privileges including complete self-autonomy were eroding. "The commercial
monopoly of the Jews declined," notes Abram Leon, "in the degree
that the peoples whose exploitation had fed it, developed." [LEON, p.
136] By the turn of the twentieth century a large Jewish proletariat had grown
and their principal agitation tended to be about "being Jewish."
"By far the most significant Jewish Marxist party was the Bund,"
notes Kochan, "It far exceeded other Russian social democratic parties
in size and influence." [KOCHAN, p. 122] The Bund expressly demanded
distinctly Jewish nationalist rights
in Russia. A second Jewish political movement of nationalist separation was
Zionism, which sought to transplant the Russian Jewish population to some
other country to establish Jewish nationalism.
In the context of Jewish traditional economic exploitation of the non-Jewish
people, its long -- and continuing -- tradition of insularity, and rising
Jewish agitation for its own separatist demands even within Russia, some Russian
Gentiles responded violently.
Riots against Jews began in 1881 after
the assassination of Tsar Alexander II; the fact that there was a Jewish member
(Gessia Gelfman) in the assassin's group enflamed already existing negative
public opinion against Jews. [LOWE, p. 59] In the further context of collapsed
grain prices, Russian crop failure, an industrial slump, and gathering groups
of peasants looking for seasonal work where there was none, 45% of all Jews
who were attacked were engaged in trade. [LOWE, p. 58] "Jews operated
independently of, and outside, the corporatist framework," says Lowe,
"which had the ... advantage
that they could avoid special taxes and other obligations in kind owed to
the guilds. This situation gave rise to the frequent complaint that Jews tried
to avoid their obligations." [LOWE, p. 60] In this vein, the official
government newspaper aggravated hostility against Jews by writing that "90%
of Jews avoided military conscription." [LOWE, p. 61] During the Russian-Japanese
War, notes Stuart Kahan, "many Jews tried various tactics to stay out
of the army. Some submitted to baptism, converting to the Church in order
to delay military duty. Or, if not that, at least be assigned to a nondangerous
position. Others bribed officers with anything they could get their hands
on in order to get out of military service." [KAHAN, S., p. 43]
In Lithuania, notes World Zionist organization
president Nahum Goldmann, "There was a law exempting only sons [i.e.,
one son in a family] from military service, and in Jewish communities it was
the rabbi who kept the birth register. So when a father had three sons they
were each entered under a different name; in my own family my grandfather
was called Leibmann, my father Goldmann, and my uncle Szalkowitz!" [GOLDMANN,
N., 1978, p. 16]
The first president of modern Israel,
Chaim Weizman, an immigrant from Russia, notes how he avoided military service
in the land he was born:
"I took advantage of this interruption in my education to get rid of
my military obligations [in Russia], which had been hanging over me like a
nightmare. It goes without saying that I had no intention of wasting four
years serving Czar Nicholas. I appeared before a conscription board, was duly
examined and duly pronounced fit. By a marvellous stroke of luck, I managed
to talk my way out of the army in a special interview with the local military
commander, a decent and cultured Russian who thought it a pity to have my
education interrupted." [WEIZMAN, C., 1949, p. 49]
Even relatively liberal newspapers continually
published accusations against the Jewish community. "In article after
article," notes Michael Aronson, "[Russian] newspapers accused the
Jews within the Pale of Settlement of being merciless exploiters of the Russian
laboring classes and the major source of their impoverishment and suffering."
[ARONSON, p. 68] The Russian Ministry of Interior published a statement in
reaction to growing attacks upon Jews:
"In the last 20 years the Jews, little
by little, have taken over not only trade
and production, but through rent or purchase,
significant amounts of
landed property. Because of their clannishness
and solidarity, all but a few
of them have bent every rule not to increase
the productive forces of the
country, but to exploit the native inhabitants,
primarily the poorer classes.
This provoked the protest of the latter,
finding such deplorable
expression in acts of violence." [LOWE, p. 64]
In the midst of riots against Jews in Russia
in 1881 a socialist organization called People's Will proclaimed that
"The people in the Ukraine suffer
most of all from the Jews. Who takes
the land, the woods, and the taverns from
out of your hands? The Jews.
From whom does the peasant, often with
tears in his eyes, have to beg
permission to get to his own field? The
Jews. Where ever you go -- the
Jews are everywhere." [LINDEMANN,
p. 141]
During the Russian pogroms against the Jews
in the late 1800s, "Jewish liquor stores," notes Heinz-Dietrich
Lowe, "and inns were often a major, or even first, target of attack."
[LOEWE, p. 56] But, says Israeli scholar Boas Evron, "the Russian pogroms
were aimed against traditionalist Jews [those who resisted assimilation into
Russian society], and only rarely did they touch the more affluent neighborhoods
where the assimilated [Jews] lived." [EVRON, p. 49]
Let us
recall briefly again, the nonassimilative Talmudic Jewish world view of the
non-Jew around him. As a German Jewish observer, I. Horowitz, noted:
"The Polish Jews of the ghetto were filled
with contempt for everything outside
their world. Their servile, craven exterior
simply masked their real sense of
the Talmudic superiority. Beneath the helpless
aspect lay a cynical, arrogant
view of the non-Jew: Jews had shut themselves
off and created states within
states. The ghetto, originally born of compulsion,
had become a second
nature, an inner necessity." [in ASCHHEIM,
S., 1982, p. 23]
The British vice-consul to Russia, L. Wagstaff,
noted the circumstances leading up to the 1880s rioting against Jews in Eastern
Europe:
"It is chiefly as brokers or middlemen
that the Jews are so prominent.
Seldom a business transaction of any kind
takes place without their
intervention, and from both sides they receive
compensation. To
enumerate some of their other occupations,
constantly denounced by
the public: they are the principal dealers
in spirits; keepers of 'vodka'
(drinking) shops and houses of ill-fame;
receivers of stolen goods;
illegal pawnbrokers and usurers. A branch
they also succeed in is as
government contractors. With their knowledge
of handling money,
they collude with unscrupulous officials
in defrauding the State to
vast amounts annually ... It must, however,
be said that there are
many well educated, highly respectable Jews
in Russia, but they
form a small minority ... In the leasing
by action of government
and provincial lands, it is invariably a
Jew who outbids the others
and afterwards re-lets plots to the peasantry
at exorbitant prices...
From first to last, the Jew has had his
hand in everything ... In their
relation to Russia [Jews] are compared to
parasites that have settled
on a plant not vigorous enough to throw
them off, and which is
being sapped of its vitality." [MACDONALD,
1998. [p. 79-80]
In 1919, a three-man committee was appointed
by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to study the situation in Poland. "The
three Americans, Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Brigadier General Edgar
Jadwin, and Homer H. Johnson," notes Sonja Wentling,
"agreed that excesses had occured, but
they differed over the causes and
and extent of the violence [against Jews]. Morgenthau,
an assimilated Jew
who opposed Jewish separatism and nationalism,
submitted a report tht
was very different in character from the one
submitted by his colleagues.
While Morgenthau emphasized the deliberate murder
of Jews based solely
on the fact that they were Jews, Jadwin and
Johnson concluded that the
problem in Poland ws due in large part to Jewish
separatism and commercial
competition ... In their [Jadwin's and Johnson's]
opinion, it was not religious
differences that had kept Poles and Jews apart,
but the history and attitude
of the Jews." [WENTLING, S., 2000, p. 388]
In a statement which can be applied virtually
anywhere, historian Mack Holt notes that "civil war, popular revolt,
and social violence were endemic to pre-modern society." [HOLT, p. 3]
Whatever the context of the riots/pogroms beginning in the late nineteenth
century in Russia against Jews, they must be weighed (as they never are) within
the growing socio-political turmoil in that country -- a society wresting
free from its foundation in (non-Jewish) indentured servitude. Violent peasants
outbursts in their struggles for justice, freedom, and dignity were many:
between 1826 and 1861 there were 1,186 "peasant uprisings" in Russia
[WOLF, E., p. 52] struggling against feudal oppressors, whoever they were. The culmination of a century's turmoil was
ultimately expressed in the Russian civil war of 1919-20 in which
nine million people perished. [KAHAN, S.,
p. 99] Other estimates cite Russian deaths at
sixteen million between 1914 and 1921, the result of war and revolution.
[CLEMENTS, B., p. 172] Bryan Moynahan notes
further, a decade later, that "the terror-famine inflicted
as a matter of Socialist policy from the beginning of 1930 probably killed
fourteen million peasants ... Whole villages were depopulated ... The Soviet
Union was still massively a peasant country; more than 80 per cent of the
population lived in its 600,000 hamlets and villages. The Communist attitude
to country people, however, was murderous. The Party never enjoyed any rural
affection." [MOYNAHAN, p. 107-108]
Those
thousands of peasants deported to other areas of Russia "sometimes spent
weeks in the [train] cars as they rolled slowly toward their place of deportation,
stacked into cattle wagons or 'Stolypin cars,' windowless prisons. The legs
of some did not touch the floor for days, because they were so tightly packed
that they hung suspended between each other." [MOYNAHAN, p. 113] As noted
earlier, many Bolshevik Jews were at the helms of these mass oppressions and
mass murders.
Judeo-centric history, however, is only
interested in the martyrological legends of its tribe and largely focuses
on the seminal 1881 rioting/pogroms against Jews which spread into 8 provinces
and 240 communities in parts of Russia. As Jewish scholar Michael Aronson
notes, however, "The number of cases of rape and murder (one of the highest
estimates refers to 40 dead and 225 rapes in 1881) seems relatively low by
twentieth-century standards. But this did not prevent the stormy events of
1881-84 from having a deeply shocking and long-lasting impact on [largely
Jewish] contemporaries." [ARONSON, p. 61] For Jews, especially in the
West, the attacks upon Jewish communities merely informed, and confirmed,
convictions of Jewish innocence and the specialness of their unique suffering
within their religiously-based martyrological tradition.
As Chaim Bermant notes, Jewish innocense and passivity
to Polish attack is not accurate:
"After the 1881 pogroms Jews began to organize
self-defence units. In the late 'eighties,
for example, a large gang which set upon
the Jews of Odessa found themselves
confronted by Jewish bands, armed with clubs
and iron-bars (and according to
the police, fire-arms), and quickly drew back.
The same happened in Berdichev
and several other centres. Jews often gave as
good as they got, even better on
occasion, but their efforts were restricted
by the police and the army, nominally
there to keep the peace, but usually siding
with the attackers. In August 1903,
there was a pitched battle in the streets of
Gomel between Jews, peasants and
railway workers in which twelve Jews and eight
Christians were killed and many
hundreds were injured: much property was looted
and destroyed. In a pogrom at
Zhitomir which extended over three days in April
1905, ten Christians and sixteen
Jews were killed -- mainly through police action.
On the third day of the fighting
a crowd of about a thousand Jews made their
way to the governor and warned
that if their attackers were not called off
they would embark upon a general
slaughter. 'Rivers of blood will flow. We will
kill all Christians irrespective of
their age, sex, class ..." [BERMANT, C.,
1977, p. 211]
The Polish side of the story in anti-Jewish
"pogroms" in that country is never mentioned in mainstream Jewish
history. As Tadeusz Piotrowski notes about violence against Jews, for example,
in the towns of Kielce and Czestochowa, "the first was sparked by a massive
demonstration involving 300 young Jews who marched up and down the town streets
chanting: 'Long live Lenin! Long live Trotsky! To hell with Poland!' The second
was precipitated by the shooting of a Polish soldier by a Jew." [PIOTROWSKI,
p. 43] Likewise too, much of the violence
against Jews in the early years of the twentieth century, in the context of
a World War, the Polish-Soviet War, and the Polish-Ukrainian War, means --
in context -- something quite different
than an exclusive Polish expression of single-minded hatred of Jews: i.e.,
irrational anti-Semitism. As Norman Davies notes in the case of the years
1918-1920, "the scale of Jewish casualties was minimal considering the
conditions in which they occurred ... That fewer than one thousand Jewish
civilians perished, when the Polish army during the same period suffered over
250,000 casualties, is a fair indication of the scale of the [Polish] disaster."
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 43]
Meticulous Jewish documentation of "anti-Semitism,"
pogroms, and other acts of violence against Jews in Europe is a central part
of Jewish history and identity. Yet, far less examined as context to anti-Jewish
animosity are the likes of Norman Salsitz's depiction of his Jewish boyhood
in small-town Poland:
"We stole fruit off the trees and
out of the orchards of the
townspeople and peasants. Why we did it
no one seemed to know.
The Poles, of course, knew of this practice
and tried their best to
protect their property. Dogs were set
upon us, and if Poles caught
up with us we could expect a beating.
But year after year it was the
same all over again. Instead of actually
taking fruit, too often we just
managed to break off the tree limbs and
ruin what was on them...
In the summer peasants also stood [in
the town market area] selling
wild strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries that they brought
along in heavy, thick baskets ... My friends
and I missed few chances
to sneak up to the baskets and run off
with a handful of berries. Why
did we do it? The berries we enjoyed,
of course, but there can be no
denying the thrill that stealing the berries
brought us, especially when
peasants gave chase for a short distance
in a vain effort to retrieve
what was rightfully theirs ... Snatching
berries didn't bother me as
much as the large number we crushed when
we made our grab."
[SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 64-65, 126]
And the terrible context for this maliciousness?
As Salsitz notes elsewhere:
"Peasants rarely had it well off. The
overwhelmingly majority barely
scraped by. Either they worked the fields
for others and received
a portion of the harvest, or they cultivated
their own plots (a large
majority owned their land), few of which
were large enough for
subsistence, let alone surplus. Most led a hand-to-mouth existence,
and worse than that in the early summer
months, when reserve
provisions were nearly exhausted and the
desperately needed new
crop was still not ripe ... They survived
in part because they made
do with so little and because of Kolbuszowa,
where they might
find an occasional job." [SALSITZ,
N., 1992, p. 88]
In the Ukraine, Jews positioned themselves
throughout history into especially volatile situations. Orest Subtleny, a
scholar of the Ukraine, writes:
"Forbidden to own land, but allowed
to lease it, Jews often became
leaseholders. Thus, on the vast lands
of the Ostrorog family, for
example, there were about 4000 Jewish
leaseholders, in 1616, over
half the crown lands in Ukraine were
leased to Jewish entrepreneurs.
Because they had to make good their
investments in a relatively
short period of two or three years,
they exploited the properties and
peasants mercilessly, without regard for future consequences.
It
was not uncommon for a leaseholder
to demand six or seven days
of labor from the peasants and, with
the help of the magnate's
minions, to drive them into the fields."
[SUBTLENY]
"In 1768," notes Jerzy Lukowski,
"there occurred ... one of the bloodiest peasant uprisings in European
history, the so-called Koliscyzna ... [in the area of Hunan] one modern study
suggests (the massacre) of 5,000 nobles and 7,000 Jews. The Jews were particularly
hated in the Ukraine, where they dominated the peasant economy as millers,
inn keepers, usurers and middlemen -- in short, as the alien instrument of
an alien authority." [LUKOWSKI, p. 60]
"In exchange for their services,"
notes Subtleny, "Jewish merchants attempted to extract the highest possible
profits. To many non-Jews it appeared that they were not only excessive, but
ill-gotten. For example, after studying the economic relationship between
Jews and Ukrainians in Transcarpathia, a Hungarian economist of Irish descent,
Edmund Egan, reported to the government that while the administration, magistrates,
and estate owners contributed to the woeful plight of the peasantry, the main
fault lay with the Jews, who as moneylenders, merchants, and tavern-keepers,
were 'disposing the Ruthenians of their money and their property.'" [SUBTLENY,
p. 311]
An 1890 Hapsburg police report noted that
"except for their daily bread, the peasants are dependent on the Jew
at every state in their lives. He serves as their customer, counselor, agent,
and factotum, in the full sense of the word." [SUBTLENY, p. 312-313]
Jewish economic dominance of Eastern Europe
commoners goes back many centuries. Abram Leon notes that "Polish money
has been discovered bearing Hebraic characters and dating from the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries. This fact in itself proves that Polish trade was
in the hands of the Jews." [LEON, p. 184-185]
In 1810 a Russian military officer, V. Bronewsky,
wrote that "Poland should in all justice be called a Jewish kingdom ...
Jewish taverns mark out all the main roads ... Apart from some rare manors
which are administered by the Lords themselves, all the others are farmed
out or pledged to the Jews. They possess enormous capitals and no one can
get along without their help. Only some few very rich Lords are not plunged
to the neck in debt with the Jews." [LEON, p. 196] Another Eastern European
traveler, one Von Furtenbach, wrote that "Everything is in [Jewish] hands.
They lend money to the Lords and peasants." [LEON, p. 196]
"The success of the Polish Jews in
the [later arendar] period," notes Hillel Levine, "in squeezing
profits from unprofitable enterprises and returning unrealistically high yields
from mandatory loans has something to do with their capacity to take advantage
of their international connections. Indeed, the rise of the arendars must
be compared with, and even linked to, the rise of the better known Court Jews
in central and western Europe." [LEVINE, p. 64]
The Polish and Ukrainian Jews first felt
large scale retribution for their self-aggrandizing policies on the backs
of the non-Jewish poor in 1648. It is a particularly accursed year in both
Jewish and Polish history, but is considered a heroic one of rebellion in
today's Ukraine. It is also the date of the beginning of an event sometimes
referred to in Jewish history as their "Third Great Catastrophe." Tens of thousands of Ukrainian Cossacks, led
by Bogdan Chmielnicki, rose up against Polish noble domination and engaged
in a vindictive orgy of vengeance and murder throughout the Ukraine and Poland.
The catalyst was when Chmielnicki came home one day to find his home confiscated
by a Polish noble, one of his sons killed, and his fiancée kidnapped. From
his personal rage Chmielnicki forged a unified revolt amongst his people against
the suffocating aristocracy. And Jews, omnipresently exploitive appendages
of aristocratic oppression as land managers, tax collectors, financial advisors,
tavern owners and merchants were soon to bear the wrath and fury, full force,
of Cossack revenge. "[The Cossacks]
first attacked the soldiers of the Polish nobles and the Jewish communities
settled on their estates, and which frequently served as their estate managers."
[REVOLT AND THE PEASANT, p. 161] The nobles' Polish armies were routed and
thousands of Jews were massacred. (One scholar believes that the Jewish community's
"rejection of their own poor" during the Cossack attacks contributed
to some Jews' conversion to Christianity.) [POLONSKY, p. 59] The Polish people
at-large, however, may have borne up to ten times the Jewish number of casualties.
[DIMONT, p. 240]
Some Jewish sources have claimed 2.4 to
3.3 million deaths during the Cossack rebellions even though there may have
been as few as 50,000 Jews in the area in which the insurrection occurred.
"The fragmentary information of the period, and to a great extent information
from subsequent years including reports of recovery -- clearly indicate that
the catastrophe may not have been as great as had been assumed." [WEINRYB,
p. 193-194]
"Contemporaries of the Cossack revolt,"
says Bernard Weinryb, "attribute it also to the extortionist practices
of the Jews. Some memoir writers (the memoirs having been written and published
later) mention also that the people hated the Jews because the latter were
leaseholders of the Greek Orthodox churches. They allegedly held the keys
to these church buildings and controlled their use. It is said that the Jews
demanded a fee for permitting the christening of a child, a wedding, and other
church affairs. This theme appears again and again in Ukranian folk songs
and other material." [WEINBRYB, p. 186]
As Israel Shahak notes
"This typical
peasant uprising against extreme oppression, an uprising
accompanied not only by massacres committed
by the rebels but also
by even more horrible atrocities and 'counter-terror'
of the Polish-
magnates' private armies, has remained
emblazoned in the conscious-
ness of East-European Jews to this very
day -- not, however, as a
peasant uprising, a revolt of the oppressed,
of the wretched of the earth,
nor even as a vengeance visited upon
all the servants of the Polish
nobility, but as an act of gratuitous
anti-Semitism directed against Jews
as such." [SHAHAK, p. 66]
In this regard, two Jewish authors, Dennis
Prager and Joseph Telushkin, expressing common Judeo-centrism, parallel the
Chmielicki attacks to the Holocaust:
"In both instances, all Jews, including
infants, were targeted for
murder; the general populace nearly always
joined in the attacks.
[PRAGER, p.19]
A well-known historian of Eastern Europe,
scholar Norman Davies, notes the typical Jewish myopia and distortion on
the subject as evidenced in Martin Gilbert's Jewish History Atlas.
Gilbert claims that over 100,000 Jews were massacred in attacks by Cossacks
beginning in 1648. Martin even writes that "[the Cossacks] joined with
the Polish peasants in attacking the Jews." "[Gilbert's readers],"
notes Davies, "might easily get the impression that the Chmielnicki
massacres were directed mainly, if not exclusively, at Jews. In fact, there
were virtually no Polish peasants at that period in the areas marked on
Gilbert's map, and the attacks on the Jews were but one part of a terrible
vengeance wracked by the Cossacks and their associates on everyone who they
regarded as agents of feudal oppression." Gilbert also noted an area
where 5,000 Jews a year died of starvation in 1880-1914. "Again,"
says Davies, "the unsuspecting reader might be led to assume that the
Jews of Galicia were the main or even only victims of starvation. There
is nothing in the text to indicate that the Polish and Ukrainian peasants
of Galicia were starving in even greater numbers." [DAVIES, Between,
p. 248]
[The following link is to a post by a Polish commentator at an online discussion
group. We at JTR cannot verify the accuracy of this list, nor the Polish
source book for this. But, from our own research, the names we recognize
on the list (Bronislaw Geremek, Jerzy Kosinski, Stanislaw Krajewski, Adam
Michnik, Jerzy Urban, Dawid Warshawski) are indeed Jewish. But Lech Walesa?!).
]
LIST OF NAME CHANGES FOR POLAND'S MOST POWERFUL/INFLUENTIAL
PEOPLE IN OUR MODERN ERA.
